User Verified Social Telematics

The User Verified Social Telematics (UVST) is a disruptive project to create an international standard and standard body, an active community of public institutions and ethical experts, and an open profitable ecosystem of providers, around the creation and evolution of the world’s most user-trustworthy general-purpose open computing service platform. It’s core paradigms are extreme minimization and levels of verification relative-to-complexity, and extreme user-accountability of organizational processes in the life-cycle and fabrication-oversight of all critical hardware and software components.

A 4-12M€UVST R&D Projectwill realize a production-ready proof-of-concept HW/SW platform with power consumption and form-factor that make it suitable for a ultra-thin touch-screen end-user device integrated or “attached” to any user’s ordinary smartphone, as well as for server, routing and other IoT/M2M equipment. It will have minimalistic text/voice features and performance, and a mid-term provisioning cost of under 1-200€/user/year in order to ensure economies of scale, extreme auditing relative to complexity, wide-market adoption, and related societal benefits.UVST will uniquely provide unprecedented and constitutionally-meaningful assurance levels of confidentiality, anonymity, integrity and authenticity, by realizing implementing UVST Principles and Requirements, which constitute the basis of the proposed standard.

At the same time – given (a) the interdependency of the constitutional rights of public safety and personal privacy, (b) the need to avoid to inadvertently aid grave crimes, and (c) the need to be legally sustainable even through a major public safety crisis – UVST, albeit acknowledging the high-risk of infeasibility, will extensively explore provider-managed service provisioning modes, in selected country pairs, that, while providing crucial key and data recovery service to users, also enable through extreme safeguards compliance to legal and constitutional – no more no less – intercept and search requests.

COST FEASIBILITY: Extreme minimization of hardware and software will allow extreme verification relative to complexity of ALL software, firmware, hardware and processes (including hardware design and manufacturing, and datacenter management processes) involved end-to-end in the UVST telematics services, which in turn will enable to achieve unprecedented assurance levels at a low per unit cost, and economic sustainability within an initial 4-12M€ UVST R&D Project budget. All its critical hardware components, will be manufactured in one or more partnering low-capacity 2-300mm semiconductor mini foundry which will reliably and sustainably allow complete oversight of any critical manufacturing processes (CivicFab); location in participating countries is preferred but not required. It will developed starting from the most minimal, verified and hardened free/open-source (or at least publicly verifiable) software and hardware components available. Most of all, it will develop highly-accountable constituent socio-technical organizational processes to manage all any critical processes potentially affecting the assurance of the computing experience.

LARGER VISION: As part of its long-term vision, concurrently or sequentially to the such initiatives, it promotes a 5-20M€ UVST Virtual District for multi-year public-private joint-venture to create, in participating regions and nations, a geo-located ecosystem of organizations and permanent facilities for the profitable design, prototyping and fabrication of compliant devices.